The Heretic

the long version

The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: "If there is a God, why would He create us? If He's perfect, all knowing, there's nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created us for his own entertainment." A dialogue of voices performed by a single actor, the play opens up a discourse, where creation interrogates religion; atheists engage believers; secularists confront theists; in the context of the most fundamental and naïve of theological questions thrown out to a live audience of any and all faiths--in a contemporary world fractured by an increasing proliferation of fundamentalisms--including people who have never been exposed to religion of any kind. This story of a Roman Catholic man tormented by the religious anxieties of his youth, who resolves to become Jesus Murphy, an evangelical atheist, makes us all believers--in ourselves.